ZHR

ZHR is an HR and payroll system we wrote ourselves: ZEMAVO Technology's own software, which we develop and adapt to the way your company works. And the company that fits the fingerprint terminal at the door is the one that writes the system reading it, so attendance reaches payroll without anyone retyping it into a spreadsheet.

• The employee file: details, contract, documents, grade history
• Departments, job titles and who reports to whom
• Attendance from the fingerprint or face terminal, with shifts and grace periods
• Leave, its balances, requests and the approval cycle
• Payroll: allowances, deductions, advances, overtime and end of service
• Permissions at screen level, and a payslip for each employee

The system has been running for a year and a half at Al Raya Market, a chain of branches and a head office whose network and racks we built. One client, said as one, and eighteen months of closing a payroll every month is what shaped the software around what the work needs rather than around what we imagined it needed.

The employee file and contracts

The system starts from one file per employee: job title, hire date, pay and the date of every change to it. A contract has an end date that the system warns about in advance, by however long you choose, because a contract that lapses with nobody noticing is the commonest thing on paper. When someone leaves, the file stays and drops out of the payroll run; it is not deleted.

Attendance from the fingerprint or face terminal

ZEMAVO Technology already supplies and installs access control and fingerprint systems, and this is where the two services meet: the terminal at the door records the finger or the face, the system reads that log and turns it under written rules into working hours, lateness, absence and overtime that go into the salary. No manual export, and no file that changes on the way.

Shifts, grace periods, rest days and work on a public holiday are defined once as rules, and the system applies them the same way every month. If your terminal was installed by somebody else we can most likely read it, once we have seen what it will export.

Leave, balances and approvals

Every kind of leave has a balance and a rule: what accrues in the year, what carries over, and what lapses. The employee sees the balance and requests the leave, the request goes to the manager and then to whoever the company names, and every step carries a name and a time. What is approved comes off the balance and shows in the salary.

Payroll: allowances, deductions and end of service

A salary is built from its parts: basic pay, fixed and variable allowances, deductions, advances and their instalments, and overtime from attendance. The end-of-service entitlement is worked out from the employee file and the remaining balance under the rules agreed, and comes out as a statement you can check before anything is paid.

The month's output is a file you give the bank and a journal entry to enter in your accounting system. We also have an accounting and point-of-sale system of our own, and connecting payroll to it is work to be agreed.

How the work runs

We sit down first with whoever calculates the payroll today, not with management alone, and write the rules as they are actually applied: the shifts, what counts as late, how leave and overtime and an advance are each worked out. That is the longest step and the most important: what is not written down there cannot be calculated afterwards.

Then we configure the system to those rules, load the staff and their balances, and connect it to the fingerprint terminal. Then a month in which the salary is run on the system and your old way, and the difference reconciled, because the first month always turns up a rule nobody mentioned. At handover we train whoever will close the month, and hand over the rules written down.

Where we work

We are in New Maadi, beside the Technology Village, and we work across Cairo and Giza and the industrial zones around them — Obour, Tenth of Ramadan, Sixth of October and the Fifth Settlement. The rules session and the training happen at your site, and what follows is done remotely.

What we do not take on

The system records attendance; it does not rule on what a record means. If there is a penalty or a disciplinary question, the decision is yours, and the system shows what was recorded, who amended it and when.

Payroll rules differ from one company to the next and cannot be calculated before they are written down, and if yours are not written we write them with you. And we are not a legal or an accounting advisor on labour law or insurance law: we implement the rates your accountant gives us, and checking them against the law is his. We do not connect the system to any government platform. We say this before the contract, not after.